MailMunch Review

Detailed Reviews

MailMunch is a lead generation tool which helps you create various kinds of opt-ins for the website. The platform comes with a wide variety of functionalities such as broadcasting newsletters and setting up autoresponders, but it is mostly known for its lead generation capabilities. It lets one create different kinds of forms and landing pages to expand the mailing or contact list.

Pros

• One can create opt-in forms, build landing pages, and send out emails using the same platform.
• Comes with plenty of style options in all the cases.
• Has a streamlined process for creating and publishing forms.
• Allows AB testing.
• The email section allows for broadcasts and simple autoresponders.
• Integrates easily with other platforms.
• Has a detailed analytics

Cons

• Email automation part can still see a lot of improvement.

Introduction

One of the most critical steps for building a successful business or online entity is to reach out to the right audience. There is no point in even being the best service provider in the world if the target audience doesn’t get to know about you.

One uses various marketing techniques to reach out to this target audience. However, once you become visible to prospects, you will realize that you still need to make some extra efforts to turn them into customers and clients.

It is a somewhat lengthy process in which the service provider needs to reach out to the prospect for better results. Email marketing is one among the various ways that one uses to maintain a communication channel with leads as well as existing customers.

But first, you need to have a valid email address of leads before you can start sending out emails to them. This is where lead generation tools come into play.

MailMunch is one such lead generation platform, which helps the user imply various legitimate techniques to ask the viewer for their email address.

It involves the use of forms, landing pages, and various other installations to achieve the goal. MailMuch is capable of doing much more than lead generation alone, but we will be focusing mostly on its lead generation capabilities in this review.

We will see how easy it is to deploy popups and other kinds of forms using this tool. Integration properties of a platform are also on the forefront when it comes to lead generation, and we will go through that as well.

You can expect to find out a few things about the email automation capabilities of the software, but the majority of things will revolve around lead generation.

We hope that you will have a much better understanding of the ins and out of MailMunch by the end of this review.

First things first

The process of website integration for lead generation tools varies from service provider to another. Some prefer to have the website integration thing settled even before you select the kind of form you want to create, while some prefer to keep it for later.

MailMunch is among the first kinds. You will have to add a website to your account before you can begin doing anything. However, there is nothing much to the process, and it takes just a few clicks.

If you have created the website on either one of WordPress, Weebly, and Shopify, then you will find clear instructions on how to integrate your website with this tool.

For every other case, all you need to do is specify the name of the website and enter the website URL. You will then get the code to embed on your website. The procedure is standard, and one should not have much difficulty taking care of it.

Once you are done connecting the website, you can proceed with the campaign.

Forms and popups

One of the most usual ways of generating leads is asking the visitor to provide her email address when she visits the website. One may use popups, scrollbar, topbar, etc. to make the request.

The ‘forms’ section of MailMunch allows the user to create the kind of form he wants and takes care of everything around it such as trigger condition, fields on the popup, the appearance, etc.

Let us briefly go through the form building process on this software.

One can create four kinds of forms on MailMunch; popover, scrollbar, topbar, and embedded. The four form types differ in the way they will appear on the prospect’s screen, and you can use any one of them for your purpose.

Popovers are what we usually refer to as popups. These will appear right in the middle of the screen, and therefore, attract most attention from the user. However, it doesn’t mean that it makes it the best way for lead generation.

It will depend entirely on the way you use it. If you throw it in such a way that it prevents the visitor from having a better experience on the website, then the visitor may not only ignore the form but leave the website altogether.

The next kind of forms are ‘topbars.’ These will float right on top of the screen but will not stop the user from doing whatever he is doing on the website. There is some kind of hindrance for sure, but something easier for the visitor to ignore.

Topbars are subtle, and so is the next category of forms on MailMunch. ‘Scrollbars’ appear at one corner of the screen, but they are big enough to get noticed easily. One can even call it a skewed version of popovers if he wants.

Finally, there are ‘embedded’ forms. These do not float on the screen as previous ones but rather act as a part of the content on the website. Embedded forms work well for webpages with a lot of content, and interfere much with user’s surfing experience.

The platform has a well-defined series of steps to create and publish all these forms. The process is pretty much the same for all of them with a few variations here and there.

Let us go through the process and understand how easy or difficult it is to create opt-in forms on Mailmunch.

Once you have decided the kind of form you want to create, you will get a bunch of template options. The templates are entirely customizable, and one can change pretty much everything on them.

Templates will help you decide the kind of layout you want to have for the form. The sizes and other schemes of things may vary a lot for two templates within a category. The templates help one have a better clue of the appearance of the form in the end, and therefore, eliminates the need for multiple iterations.

The next step allows the user to manage the content of the form. One’s choice of words should be such that it motivates the visitor to respond positively to the call-to-action. This step of form building process allows you to do exactly that by eliminating the distractions and providing only the needful.

The appearance section follows once you have taken care of the message. This one will let you manage themes, background, text color, etc. Depending on the subscription plan you have, you can even embed custom CSS in this section.

Most of the times, it will be the visitor’s email address that you would be after, but some campaigns may require you to collect additional information. The ‘field’ section lets one introduce more form fields into the form if needed.

You can either pick one of the available field options or create one yourself. One can also change button text in this section.

Triggers have got quite a lot to do with the success of any lead generation campaign. The timing of the popup appearing on the screen can have a lot to do with the user’s reaction to it.

Depending on the kind of form you are building, you will get options to manage its behavior. You can specify rules for when the popover appears, and how frequently it should appear on an individual’s screen.

There are usual trigger options such as the ones to show the popover when page loads and when the user is leaving the page or website. The exit-intent popovers are among the better ones for lead generation. They don’t interfere with whatever the user is doing on the website, and give a gentle reminder when the user is leaving.

The section lets you decide what would happen once someone subscribes. You can choose the mailing list in which the contacts will be saved, and if the user should be redirected to some URL after subscription.

MailMunch allows the creation of responsive forms and pages. You can get a preview of how the form will appear on screens with different dimensions. But if you want the lead generation forms to appear only on a specific category of devices, then you can manage the settings for that in the behavior section.

It allows one to show or not show the forms on mobiles, tablets, and desktop devices.

There are some additional options on top of usual behavior settings. You can enable ‘Content Gate’ which would ensure that one can access the content of the website only after subscribing.

MailMunch comes with spam protection already. But you can add another layer by introducing Google reCAPTCHA protection on top of it.

The final two steps of the form building process are concerned with integrations and publishing the form. We will discuss these things in later sections of this review.

Even though MailMunch was thorough with the process, there are one or two things we would have loved to see during the form building process.

They do not provide the option to dictate the physical location of forms on the screen. It could’ve been a helpful feature, at least in the case of scrollboxes.

They could’ve also provided the user with the option to add or remove some elements into the form. It would have made the entire process a lot more flexible.

Apart from these things that we missed having on the platform, we liked how one can create and publish forms in a matter of minutes.

Landing pages

Lead generation campaigns use forms for website owners to install them on the website and gather lead. One can even try to use such forms for other purposes if needed. However, forms somehow seem more suited for lead generation only.

Landing pages find a place in lead generation as well as marketing campaigns. Marketers use them for all sorts of call-to-actions ranging from newsletter subscription to a product sale.

Unlike forms, landing pages don’t always need to be on the service provider’s website. One can publish them separately or include it on the website. Landing pages provide more freedom as well as functionality to the campaign as compared to pages.

MailMunch offers one to create landing pages to gather more leads. Creating a landing page can be a bit more complicated task as compared to building forms.

One needs to make sure that the landing page is rich in content and ensure that there are not many elements distracting the viewer from the call to action at the same time. The task doesn’t sound that simple, and it requires one to put on the thinking cap if they want to create an effective landing page.

A page building platform such as MailMunch can’t think for you, but it can surely provide one with useful tools to implement ideas.

Let us have a look at what they have got to offer when it comes to creating landing pages. Once again, it starts with a lot of template options. The templates differ in layout, styles, and so much more.

The builder will take you straight to the editor as soon as you pick the template. It is an interactive editor where you can interact with elements on the page to modify them. The panel on the right will show all the available modification options for the component on selection.

If you want to make some changes in the structure of the page, or if you want to add more elements to it, then the editor allows for that, as well. You can include a lot more to the page other than just text and images.

There can be social share buttons, forms, HTML, videos, columns, etc. These things will help you take care of the content on the page, and there is also a set of elements which you can add to customize the structure of the page.

There are multiple structure block options that you can place on the website and then add content elements into them. Finally, you can also take care of the background color, background image, font family, etc.

The editing part for the landing pages is extremely simple and doesn’t require much learning.

Once the visitor responds positively to the call-to-action, you can choose either to display a thank you page or you can redirect the visitor to another website. If you go for the thank you page, then the next section will let you edit it.

In the next step, you can specify the title of the page and provide a description for it. Other service providers would’ve referred to it as SEO settings. It is in this step that you can choose the mailing list in which the new contacts will be saved.

Finally, it is the integration and publishing steps.

Building a landing page is a relatively simple task on MailMunch. Things could’ve been much better if there were more element options to add such as timer and map.

But the service provider did a great job of keeping things simple and straightforward.

Autoresponders and broadcasts

MailMunch is a lead generation tool with some email automation and marketing capabilities. You can’t expect the email automation part of this platform to have the same capabilities as some of the popular ones out there.

We would say that it will do the trick for people who are only starting with email automation and outreach campaigns. As the needs start getting more specific and intricate, the email automation part of this tool will only get more and more obsolete for the user.

Anyway, let us have a look at what kind of email automations one can have on MailMunch.

There are two sections for sending out emails. You can do it either through broadcasts or autoresponders.

Under broadcasts, you can create an email and send it to the contact within a mailing list or a segment. Once again, the process is divided into a few simple steps.

First, you will need to pick the template of your liking. There are plenty of options once again, and there are enough differences between individual templates to make the choices meaningful.

The editor is the same as the one we came across for landing pages. You can add elements, add structure blocks, modify content and image the way you want, etc.

The next step involves specifying the subject of the mail and the sender’s credentials. Then you get to pick the recipients of the email. You can either choose a mailing list or pick a segment.

Segments allow one to be dynamic with the contacts. One can have segments which account for dates when recipients were added to the list, their activity status, and other attributes.

The provision for segments on MailMunch makes its minimalistic email automation tool seem much better.

After choosing the audience for the email, you can send the email right at the moment or schedule it for later. The tool allows one to factor in various time zones when scheduling the email.

The email creation part for autoresponders is precisely the same as it is for broadcasts. The only difference is in the deployment part. The autoresponder on this platform sends out email only to new subscribers of a list.

You can’t have any other automation such as sending out emails on birthdays or anniversaries.

As we said earlier, there is nothing spectacular about email automation part of MailMunch, but it can definitely take care of a few tasks.

Integrations

Lead generation tools are seldom used alone. It only makes sense to have a good enough marketing platform to make the most out of all the contacts you gather through a lead generation campaign.

MailMunch comes with a dedicated section for integrations. It allows the user to pick the email marketing or CRM software of choice.

Since one can take care of integrations for individual forms and pages, it becomes straightforward to keep the contacts sorted according to the campaign.

Integrations are not only about connecting to a platform capable of dealing with the contacts you gather, but there can be other things in the equation, as well.

Compatibility with various website and online store building can be crucial. Some may want to connect it with some analytics tool, and so on.

MailMunch won’t disappoint you much in the integration section. You will find most the popular and necessary integration options in their list of directly integrable platforms. And for a lot of other things, you will have the luxury of using Zapier as the link.

Integrability with other platforms never seemed like much of an issue, and they have done a great job of including it in the form building process.

Analytics

No campaign is successful until you have got numbers to show for it. Stats help in monitoring progress and refining strategies.

MailMunch comes with a detailed analytics section to keep the user informed about everything happening around a campaign.

One can monitor conversion rates, keep an eye on the views, find out what kind of strategy is working best, etc.

Analytics is present only for a premium subscription plan on MailMunch. It depends entirely on the user how well she uses the analytics stats to make it worth investing in the premium plan. However, MailMunch will do its part by providing all the information that one may need for the assessment of campaigns.

It is much easier to appreciate the importance of analytics during AB testing on the platform. It allows on to publish two versions of the same form and then find out which strategy seems to be working best for the campaign.

You will have to look into stats to find out which is doing well. The numbers will guide one to the right path, and therefore to a more successful lead generation campaign.

Conclusion

Mailmunch is a lead generation tool with something for all kinds of users and enterprises. It doesn’t matter if it just a relatively new blogger with a new website trying to grow his email list or if it is an organization trying to put in some life to its existing outreach campaign.

They have plans which cater to a wide range of necessities and uses. The plans are only one example to showcase the inclusiveness and flexibility of the platform.

There are plenty of options right from the get-go for opt-in forms and landing pages. There are other lead generation tools which come with more features and options, but if you factor in the money, then MailMunch provides a sweet deal for sure.

Publishing forms and integrating them with websites is a straightforward process. One does not need to be an expert on computing languages to take care of it.

The email automation part of the platform may or may not turn out to be a valuable asset for you. It depends on the requirements of your campaigns. If you want anything more than simple broadcasting or autoresponders capable of handling various situations, then it’s better you look for some other email automation platform.

Third-party integrations and the analytics section should not trouble anyone. MailMunch is easy to synchronize with a wide range of marketing and automation tools, and it will take only a few clicks to take care of the process.

They provide a free plan, which in our opinion, is an excellent way to get some idea of how the tool works. Even though it will not give you the experience of all the features on the platform, we feel it’s a good point to start.